Down With Liberty... Up With Chains!

New project from Ian Svenonius (Nation of Ulysses, Weird War) recalls his late-90s material with the Make-Up and is the best thing he's done since.

Ian Svenonius has been working his ironic-not-ironic far-left rock'n'roll intellectual persona for more than 20 years now, and at this point, it is very hard to imagine that he ever breaks character. Whether he is fronting one of his many bands, penning provocative essays, or interviewing other musicians on his internet talk show, Svenonius is fully committed to a distinct personal aesthetic that he developed as the singer of the Nation of Ulysses that essentially boils down to a stylistic and philosophical marriage of groovy 1960s radicalism and late-80s indie-punk ethos. It's an affectation for sure, but even at his silliest extremes, it is abundantly clear that Svenonius fully believes in his rhetoric, and that it's not just some elaborate joke at the expense of old-school hipster intelligentsia. If anything, it has become clear that his performance is inherently confrontational in the way it forces cynical, complacent audiences to reckon with idealistic discontent and unapologetic goofiness, and nudges them to wonder how and why it became so uncool to mix pleasure and politics.

Chain and the Gang, Svenonius' latest band, does not stray far from the sound of his previous work, though it does mostly jettison the hard psychedelic style of his Weird War project. As the name of the group implies, he has integrated some elements of prison blues, but the funky playfulness of the music mostly recalls his late-90s material as the frontman of the Make-Up. This is a welcome return to form-- though Weird War had a number of great songs, too many of their recordings felt stuffy and overbearing, and Svenonius' slinky, highly expressive voice is flattered by compositions with ample negative space. The grooves on Down With Liberty... Up With Chains! are about as loose as a band can get without being remotely sloppy, and the result is an album that emphasizes a sense of levity that has always been present in his work, but had never been quite as dominant as in this set of songs.

Though Svenonius takes on some heavy topics throughout the record-- at one point, he's calling out for reparations!-- the politics of Chain and the Gang are primarily focused on matters of lifestyle and personal conduct. This is most evident on "Trash Talk", a rant against the omnipresence of snarkiness that owes more to the humanity and humor of Sly and the Family Stone than the clueless prissiness of anti-snark critic David Denby. It also comes through in the cheerful party rocker "Room 19", and in "Unpronounceable Name", a swinging, jazzy delight in which Svenonius plays the role of a romantic lead in pursuit of a woman with a name so difficult to say that she becomes entirely elusive and nearly mythical. Not all of the songs are gems-- the relatively dirge-like "Deathbed Confession" overstays its welcome by a few minutes, and the deliberately primitive "(Lookin' For a) Cavegirl" is rather tedious even before its first minute is through-- but otherwise the quality control is rather high, and the result may be Svenonius' best overall LP since the Make-Up's Save Yourself was released a decade ago.